Have you ever enjoyed a first-person shooter (FPS) game on a tablet or smartphone? Really enjoyed it, I mean.

I've tried very hard with technically-polished games like Eliminate, the N.O.V.A. games and Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies, but they haven't quite clicked, usually because I'm thinking too much about the controls – virtual analogue sticks in particular.

Ben Cousins has been thinking the same thing, but he's actually doing something about it. His Stockholm-based development studio, Scattered Entertainment, is working on an iOS first-person shooter called The Drowning which aims to junk the virtual sticks.

Cousins used to work at Electronic Arts on its Battlefield series of FPS games, and has hired development talent for his new studio with experience on franchises like Halo, Far Cry and Need For Speed, as well as games like Bullet Storm and Crysis.

"Early on, the tablet struck me as a really great gaming platform just because it's convenient enough that you can play it anywhere," he says.

"It's big and high-resolution enough that you can have almost as good an experience as playing on a big TV. There's something about playing shooters on a tablet, and having it close to your face, that provides an intimacy like on PC."

Cousins played a number of FPS games on tablets, and found he was always dissatisfied by their controls – specifically with the standard feature of controlling movement with his left-thumb via a virtual stick.

"It's like a joystick with the weakest spring possible on it, and loads of travel," he says. "I wanted to create a mobile shooter that appeals to everyone who likes the idea of playing a shooter on a mobile device, but there's a cap on the number of gamers you can reach with a virtual-stick system."

Several months, lots of prototyping and some instructive focus-group sessions later – "One guy said 'why can't I just tap the enemies to shoot them?' and it flipped a switch in my head," says Cousins – The Drowning's controls were up and running.

You'll tap on the screen to move to that point, swipe to look around, and tap two fingers on-screen to shoot at the midpoint between them. I haven't played it, but a video released by Scattered Entertainment (embedded at the bottom of this interview) looks impressive.

Cousins is certainly confident that the controls are intuitive and well suited to touchscreens, without dumbing down the actual gameplay.

"Our shooting system is infinitely faster, more accurate and skill-based than using a joystick," he says. "It's a bit more like using a mouse to shoot. And it plays to the strengths of the device: you have this sense of directly interacting with things, of tactile control."

The Drowning, which starts with a spate of mysterious bird deaths and quickly escalates into a global zombie-infested disaster, will be published by Scattered Entertainment's parent company DeNA, which is best known for its lucrative free-to-play mobile games platform Mobage in its native Japan.

So yes, The Drowning will be a freemium game: free to play and making its money from in-app purchases.

It's not the first freemium FPS on iOS – ngmoco's Eliminate came out in November 2009 – but as the current storm around Real Racing 3 shows, applying freemium mechanics to a core gaming genre can be controversial.

Cousins says it's his tenth free-to-play game, so he's something of an old hand. He says DeNA's experience will be important in ensuring it's fun to play rather than a pay-me-please grind.

"They come from this extremely competitive and lucrative Japanese free-to-play business, which is years ahead of the West in terms of the sophisticated monetisation of games," he says.

"It's not about how to fleece people out of money. They realise that if it's got to be fun and integrated into the gaming experience. If you talk to guys in Japan, they're always talking about making the monetisation fun and useful and interesting, so it's positive for the player rather than a negative experience."

Ben Cousins of Scattered Entertainment PR

The structure of The Drowning sounds interesting, with action chopped up into two-minute bursts in arenas – "we took lessons from Bejeweled Blitz" – where players will have to deal as much damage as possible to the zombies, then scavenge the battlefield for parts to make new weapons and items.

The scavenging will be "a user interface a bit like playing a slot machine," according to Cousins. "Tap a button and we'll randomly throw an item at you. But you'll be able to spend a small amount of money to get another scavenge on that turn. There's also one character who you can give money to to get access to a junkyard where you can scavenge for rare weapons."

He suggests that it's important that the scavenging will be for parts rather than entire weapons, saying DeNA has learned in Japan that if you "give people something powerful just for spending money", it shortens their lifespan in the game.

"It's just instant gratification, whereas if you give them something to do, they're more likely to stick around," he says.

"It's that sense of randomisation and excitement about not knowing what you're going to get, rather than just spending $15 on an ultra-powerful weapon. It's only been tried in the Western world with card-battle games, but The Drowning is the first time these mechanics have been attempted in a core game."

The Drowning will be released on iOS first, but Cousins says a team in The Netherlands has already started work on an Android port of the game.

"We're iOS-first in terms of timing, but tablet-first is the focus for our studio, even though we'll support small-screen devices too," says Cousins.

"The games we want to create work better on tablets. This isn't a game that's going to have an Angry Birds level of downloads. It's a smaller, hardcore audience more likely to be playing on tablets."

Won't they be preferring to play on consoles or PCs though? Actually, Cousins thinks there's a significant audience out there of what he calls "lapsed gamers" who are more likely to be playing on tablet devices in the living room.

"It's older guys like me who've lost that moment in their lives where they sat down in front of a TV and played a game for four hours, yet who aren't quite satisfied with Angry Birds. A lot of those guys have tablets now," he says.